Chrome 44 Launches With Tweaks To Push Messaging and Notifications

An anonymous reader writes: Google has launched Chrome 44 for Windows, Mac, and Linux with new developer tools. Aside from a host of security fixes, this release focuses mainly on developer features. The API for push notifications was updated to match the specification, a new implementation of multi-column layout was added, and they've extended support for Unicode escapes in strings. The full changelog notes a number of performance improvements as well.

Comments

Glad somebody is taking columns seriously

[jfengel]

I find the lack of columns one of the more striking failures of CSS design. They don't appear to have consulted with anybody who actually knew anything about why things get laid on on a page the way they do. Line lengths are one of the more important factors in determining how easy it is to read something; the eye has a hard time tracking back on wide texts. Default layouts try to compensate with wide spacing, which just wastes a lot of space (and looks, at least to me, very unappealing).

I look forward to other browsers implementing this, so that web page designers (especially for responsible web pages) start using it instead of the hacks and design compromises they're currently forced into.

Can we maybe fix the memory leaks?

[Hadlock]

Sometime in the last five releases it feels like the number of memory leaks in Chrome have just skyrocketed. Maybe I'm not the normal use case, but I typically leave Chrome and various tabs open for days or weeks at a time, and eventually causes Windows to panic and close Chrome to recover that memory. My wild-ass-guess is that it's related to HTML5 video but maybe it's something else. I freakin' love chrome, but the memory leaks are seriously making me consider something a little more stable.
 
Chrome is the only application I use that ever, ever has memory leaks now in 2015.

Re:Can we maybe fix the memory leaks?

[CreatureComfort]

Well, that's just because you don't use Firefox any more. I just switched to Chrome from Firefox because it had become absolutely unusable due to memory leaks.

Opening Firefox in the morning, it loads into ~250,000 K (!) on open. After a day of browsing, and closing back to my single home tab (Google.com), it would be using ~350,000 K. Leave it overnight, with just that home tab open, in the morning it would be using 800,000 K - 1,200,000 K and the entire OS would be at a crawl until I closed the process.

BTW, Chrome always seems to use about 200,000 K - 250,000 K no matter what I'm doing.